Category Archives: Random musings

I’ve been feeling a bit under the weather lately but today I pulled myself together to work on this post. Phew! A lot has been happening lately. And there are a couple of things I want to write about.

Earlier today I noticed that Titansgrave: The Ashes of Valkana has already been released on DriveThruRPG. Alas I failed my willpower check and bought it immediately. Luckily it’s an awesome-looking book for a reasonable price. The PDF contains some setting information, a couple of rules for Fantasy AGE, and the full campaign Wil Wheaton has run in his latest Youtube series. I would have hoped for more setting information, but I am sure Green Ronin will release more information in the future.

Apropos DriveThruRPG, they are celebrating their Xmas in July Sale again. So if you feel the need to spend your hard-earned cash on some roleplaying game stuff, you should check out what they have to offer.

In other news I am still struggling with my space opera setting. I’ve been working on various ideas for such a setting for ages now, but alas nothing seems to feel “right”. Everything either ends up being too generic or too close to an existing setting. Sometimes I come up with a great idea, but it just doesn’t work as a roleplaying-game setting. Perhaps I should keep some of those ideas in mind if I ever start writing short stories.

Recently I started rewatching the 1970s Captain Future anime series, and even though it didn’t really help me with my space opera project, it was at least entertaining. Yes, the dialogues are sometimes pretty horrible, and sometimes it’s pretty sexist, but that’s probably because the source material was created in less civilized times. By the way, you should definitely check out the soundtrack of the German version of the series, because it totally rocks!

Recently I read about Worlds in Peril, a superhero game powered by the Apocalypse World rules. Has anyone of you already played this game? Obviously you can learn the rules by reading a comic included in the book. Neat!
I have to admit that while I enjoy these games from the player perspective, I haven’t really wrapped my head around the GM side of things. Do you have any advice for me?

These six words immediately conjure up one image: the starship USS Enterprise NCC-1701. It’s also the name of an excellent fan-made Star Trek roleplaying game based on Microlite20. Recently my Numenera campaign had to go on a break because a player was abroad, so I decided to run a Star Trek one-shot instead.

The premise of the game is that after the V’Ger incident (see Star Trek: The Motion Picture), Starfleet is forced to un-mothball a couple of old Daedalus class ships and man then with inexperienced crews. One of these crews contains the player characters. Fellow RPG blogger and good friend Marcus aka Chaotic GM took on the role of captain and even sported a nice yellow shirt complete with Starfleet command insigna at the game table. The party also consisted of an Andorian chief engineer, a Vulcan security officer, a Human doctor, and a psychic communications officer. Their ship was the USS Heisenberg, a revamped Daedalus class ship, which had a brand-new Warp 8 drive and proper deflector shields and two phaser arrays.

During their first mission the Heisenberg crew escorted a Starfleet Commodore to his new post at Starbase 15, made first contact with an alien species, the mysterious Maakar (which are loosely based on a species from the Perry Rhodan series), and helped to save said aliens and even the crew of another Starfleet starship. And in the good traditions of Starfleet not one shot was fired.

Overall we were all having a blast. Character creation was fast and each character had the proper Star Trek feel to it. Where No Man Has Gone Before manages to bring the atmosphere of the series to the game table perfectly. The rules are so light that they never got into the way and everyone agreed that we should continue the mission of the USS Heisenberg.

If you are now interested in checking out WNMHGB yourself, you can download it for free from the creator’s website. Please note that the site uses a non-standard port, so it might not work if your computer sits behind a corporate firewall.

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About the Author

Stargazer

Michael Wolf is a German games designer and enthusiast best known for his English language role-playing games blog, Stargazer's World, and for creating the free rules-light medieval fantasy adventure game Warrior, Rogue & Mage. He has also worked as an English translator on the German-language Dungeonslayers role-playing game and was part of its editorial team.

In addition to his work on Warrior, Rogue & Mage and Dungeonslayers, he has created several self-published games and also performed layout services and published other independent role-playing games such as A Wanderer's Romance, Badass, and the Wyrm System derivative Resolute, Adventurer & Genius, all released through his imprint Stargazer Games.

Professionally, he works as a video technician and information technologies specialist. Stargazer's World was started by Michael in August 2008.